Real Ale, Real Music

I've been back over the Pennines and revisited a few old favourite haunts followed by a gig in a new venue on a typically wet Manchester evening. I had a good evening overall, although unfortunately one of the places turned out to be an unexpected let down.... The spots of rain started to appear on the window as soon as my train slipped through the Pennines, somewhere between Walsden and Littleborough. By the time we arrived in Rochdale, little streams were flowing down the glass, meeting each other, coalescing, and changing course as the train rocked and railed along the track. We arrived in Victoria, and I decided to stay dry,  at least for now, at least on the outside, by heading to the Victoria Tap for a Welcome to Manchester pint. The small bar was quite busy with a mid-afternoon crowd but I got served pretty quickly. I went for a pint of a beer from a new brewery to me, Coleys, who are based nearby in the Weaste area of Salford, just off Eccles New Road. Their website descr...

A few thoughts on a fairly local and relatively small, independent family brewery who are well known to cask beer drinkers throughout the country for one of their beers, whilst closer to home they have once again been selling off some of their pubs.... As regular readers of this blog may recall, I was conducting some field research in Leeds the other week, and in the resultant write-up I referred to the  Town Hall Tavern on Westgate which has been run by Taylors Brewery for the past few years as their pied-a-terre in the city, but as I noted it was closed and up for sale when I walked past. Coincidentally, I had also recently picked up a copy of Alesman , the excellent magazine produced by Keighley & Craven CAMRA in which there was an interesting article by the editor on Taylors, whose brewery is of course situated in the town. In it it was mentioned that not only was the Town Hall Tavern up for sale, but also Taylors' only pub in Harrogate, the Inn at Cheltenham Parade, plus...

The first football trip away of 2026 which once again took me to a new town and a new ground, with an excellent night in a busy historic part of the capital following on. Here's what happened.... It was an early start. The taxi dropped me off at Halifax railway station just before 7.30, and not much later my brother joined me after walking there from home. Our train arrived, a couple of minutes late, and soon we were starting our long journey, first to London, and then on to the Hampshire town of Aldershot where FC Halifax Town were playing this afternoon. For a change we were going via Manchester and then into Euston, as this was a weekend of engineering works on the East Coast line south of Peterborough. We duly arrived in Euston, a delay at Rugby having scuppered the chance of a pint in London. We headed down to Southwark where we had booked early check-in at our Travelodge, whìch was handily close to the tube station. Bags dropped off, we went back to Waterloo, from where we ca...

Welcome to this latest blog, in which I celebrate the return of a couple of historic city pubs under new ownership and direction, and lament the apparent passing of one of Leeds' best-known and long-established pubs.... It was another weekend where trains that would normally be going through Huddersfield from west of the Pennines were being re-routed via the Calder Valley, this time due to ongoing repairs to the Standedge Tunnel following a recent fire. This meant there were up to 5 trains an hour in either direction stopping at Brighouse and most of the services going east were only stopping at Dewsbury on the way to Leeds meaning journey times were 20 minutes or less. So with that in mind I decided to head over there to visit a couple of former Tetley pubs that have reopened after some serious refurbishment. The weather was quite mild for the first day of February, the clouds had lifted, and a weak sun was doing its best to consign the gloom of January to a distant memory. The bi...